


Strings

by grittycupcakes



Series: Noah Czerny and Decaying: The (After)Life of a Teenage Murder Victim [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: But theres also a bit of plot, Gen, Matthew's narrating because I hate the fanon and canon characterization of him, and I wanted some existential teenage bullshit that didn't involve being a ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 07:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12127617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grittycupcakes/pseuds/grittycupcakes
Summary: Matthew Lynch isn't just a dream. He's a person, a real, breathing person with a personality of his own and he is most definitely a dynamic, charming guy.At least, that's what he tells himself.





	Strings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BookDragon14](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BookDragon14/gifts).



Matthew knows, objectively, that Ronan has a drinking problem. He knows, objectively, that Declan might end up addicted to those prescription-grade ibuprofen he’s been taking for his headaches. He knows that maybe he shouldn’t be as trusting as he is. Matthew knows, alright? Plenty of people have told him. And anyway, it’s not like he’s a  _ complete  _ idiot. He knows  _ lots  _ of things, thank you very much. He knows the pythagorean theorem, and how to play niche Irish instruments, and that his father didn’t love Declan as much as he should’ve, and that’s part of the reason Declan and Ronan clash so much. The most loved and the least, always butting heads.

Other things Matthew knows, objectively:

  * One of Ronan’s friends is a ghost.
  * His mother, Aurora Lynch, lives in a magical forest that could disappear at any time, really.
  * Aurora a dream, actually, pulled right from Niall Lynch’s head.
  * So were most things at the Barnes, from the cows to the toaster.
  * Ronan can dream things to life too.
  * Ronan dreamed his pet raven to life.



This last one isn’t so certain, but Matthew has this gut feeling about it, so it’s going on this list too:

  * Matthew Lynch is a dream, just like his mother. Only he’s from Ronan’s head, not Niall’s.



Don’t ask him how he knows. He just…  _ knows,  _ alright? It would explain most things, honestly.

Actually, scratch that - it just makes everything more confusing. How can a dream grow? How can it age? Is a dream person even a real person? Can their personality ever develop, or are they stuck with what they were given in that dream?

Are any of Matthew’s emotions real? Is anything, anything at all, about Matthew Lynch, third son of Niall and Aurora Lynch, product of a three year old Ronan Lynch’s imagination,  _ real? _

His brothers don’t know that he knows. Matthew isn’t sure how  _ he _ knows. It’s part overheard conversation, part deep dark insecurity, part existential crisis. (Matthew knows what  _ that _ is, too. Suck it, Richmond, he’s not a dunce.) He almost wishes he didn’t know, so that he could go on being happy-go-lucky Matty Lynch, carefree with the sun bouncing off his curls.

He probably wouldn’t be able to be that version of himself anyway. Not after the Fourth of July.

Matthew shudders, leaning heavily against his headboard. In the next bed over, his roommate-Richmond-snores. Matthew considers buying him one of those pillows that make you stop snoring, or maybe buying earplugs. When he doesn’t get enough sleep, he gets all self-reflective and morose. (He had to look up that word in the dictionary when he first heard it. Richmond still hasn’t let that go.)

Matthew looks at his cellphone and aches; for his father, for the Barns, for his early childhood. He snatches it off the bedside table and dials a number.

One of the good things about being Ronan’s dream is that he always picks up Matthew’s calls. He always makes time for Matthew, in between being grumpy and following around Dick Gansey and Adam Parrish and muttering things to Chainsaw while stroking her feathers. It’s nice.

“Yeah?” Ronan asks instead of greeting him. He’s never been one for the niceties. Ronan is probably drunk. “Chainsaw, say hi!” He says, though it’s muffled; he probably covered the phone with his hand. Chainsaw caws her greeting.

“Hey, Ronan.” Matthew says, quietly. Over the phone, he can hear Ronan’s electronica loud and clear. Even if it’s not his type of music, Matthew can appreciate the beat of it. It’s the kind of stuff you might hear at a rave or something. 

“What’re you doin’ awake?” Ronan asks, and yeah, he’s  _ definitely _ a little buzzed.

“Can’t sleep. What about you?”

“Me neither.” There’s rustling, fabric moving against fabric. “Do you need something?” 

Matthew shakes his head, even though Ronan can’t see him. “I just wanted to talk to you. See what you were doing.”

“You wanted to talk. At three in the morning.” He can imagine Ronan’s face right now, one eyebrow arched, a curl to his lip. For anyone else, even Gansey, there’d be something cruel to it. It’s never that way, with Matthew. 

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Matthew shrugs. “I don’t know,” he replies, bringing one of his knees up to his chest. “I figured you’d be awake, is all, and I never see you at school, so…”

Ronan made a noise, and his bed creaked. Maybe he was laying down? “I get it, Matthew.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.” Why does it surprise him when Ronan understands him? They’re brothers, but closer than that. Ronan’s the only reason he exists.

Why does that though make him want to puke? Maybe it’s because he wants to be something more, like some spark of ambition is steadily setting him on fire now that he knows almost for certain that he’s a dream. Now he wants to do something big with himself, wants to be somebody. Maybe it’s the adolescent desire to prove himself, however he can. Maybe. Maybe. 

Maybe Matthew just wants to be a real boy instead of a wooden puppet, hand-crafted with a smile painted red on his wooden face.

“Matt?” Ronan asks, and Matthew snaps out of it. He doesn’t know how much time he’s lost. “You alright?”

Matthew sighs. “Yeah. Sorry. Just... Tired.”

“Mm. Tired.”

“Yeah.” 

“Lay down, Matt.” Ronan’s voice is soft, more a butter knife than a razor blade. It’s the voice that talked Declan into poking a bee’s nest. A voice that reminds him a little bit of Gansey. Matthew obeys it, and crawls under his covers. Ronan waits til Matthew’s head is on the pillow before he speaks again. 

“Now close your eyes.” Again, Matthew does as told. His eyelids are heavy, anyway. He can’t keep them up very long. Ronan is quiet for a long time afterwards, and Matthew forces himself to stay awake at least till he speaks again.

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.” Ronan says, and Matthew smiles. He hasn’t heard Ronan getting up to get the book; he must have it by the bed. Given the state of Ronan’s room at Monmouth Manufacturing, that wouldn’t surprise him. “Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it…” 

Like this, Matthew drifts off to sleep, letting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and his brother’s voice soothe his heart.

 

-

 

Richmond, predictably, is lecturing him. He lost track of whatever he’s blabbering about twenty minutes ago, when all of it started. He’d been red in the face-more than usual, anyway, which is an achievement-and holding a towel. Matthew’s towel, apparently, but it wasn’t, because Matthew never left things on the ground that weren’t supposed to be on the ground. Matthew is tidy, tidy to the extreme.

Of course, pointing out that fact didn’t help the situation. Nothing can stop Richmond once he gets going. Now he’s more purple than red, kind of like a beet. He’s saying something about how cleanliness is a sign of intelligence, and of “proper breeding”, whatever  _ that _ means. Matthew’s at his desk, trying  _ valiantly  _ to get through his Geometry work, but Richmond’s shouting into his ear and they’re going to get noise complaints and then Matthew’s going to get kicked out because he’s not top student like  _ Richmond. _ And then he’ll die poor under a bridge.

“Could you shut up?” 

That stops him, finally. Matthew looks over his shoulder at him; Richmond’s face is white. “Excuse me?”

“I said,” Matthew makes his voice slow for this, drawn out, and turns around fully. “Could you  _ shut up? _ ” Richmond is gaping like a fish, and it’s hilarious. Matthew kind of understands it; after all: he’s never been a confrontational sort of guy. He prefers to let his brothers do the fighting, so he can step in and make everything better. 

Now, though? Now, he’s feeling less Aurora and more Niall, which basically means that he wants to punch his  _ stupid _ roommate in his  _ stupid _ , cherry-colored face. He wants to prove that most of him is muscle, that his stockiness isn’t just the baby fat of childhood that still clings to his cheekbones. 

He stands up. Richmond backs up, stumbling over his own feet. It feels electric, in a way nothing else ever has. It feels like danger. His blood thrums with it.

“I-I can’t believe you’d speak to me that way.” Richmond blusters, and Matthew almost laughs, because he’s got that prideful glint in his eye again instead of the shock of a few seconds ago. “Telling  _ me  _ to shut up! I’m the richest kid at this school! My father donated one hundred thousand dollars last year  _ alone _ . I  _ know  _ people. I could get you and your fuck-up brother out of this school with a snap of my fingers.” Richmond sneers, showing off his braces. The rubber bands are green.

That’s the last straw, really. But he’s not like his brothers, flying into explosive fury--no. Matthew’s always been slower. A lion on the hunt, his wrestling coach says. Finally, Matthew sort of understands what he meant. He takes a step forward. Richmond looks at the door. He’s no track star, but the guy is fast, lightweight and built for movement. Unfortunately for him, Matthew hates being alone, so he does a sport every season. One of Matthew’s sports is track. 

Matthew takes another step toward him. Richmond bolts.

He lets him go, and doesn’t move long after the door has swung shut. That’s another way he’s different from his brothers. He’s  _ patient _ . He sits down at his desk, and does his math, and plans.

Three hours later, Richmond comes back, something steely in his eyes. Matthew, who’s just gotten out of the shower, smiles. “Hey,” he says, and waves. “I just forgot my clothes out here. I’ll change, and then the bathroom’s all yours.”

Richmond stares at him like he’s lost his mind. Steel turns to liquid confusion. He blinks, twice. Matthew pays him no attention, gathering up his pajamas and breezing by him. Richmond watches him go, gaping at him like a fish out of water.  _ Glub glub glub, Matt must have hit his head in the tub, because he’s gone batshit.   _

Matthew kind of likes the way his calm makes Richmond squirm. It’s-and here’s a word Richmond would appreciate- _ vindicating _ . He smiles, pulling his t-shirt over his head, shucking on his pajama bottoms. When he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees gold curls turned bronze, tan skin and pink chinks. But most of all, Matthew sees his mouth, spread in a grin as sharp as a knife. His blood runs cold.

 

\---

 

Noah watches the bright blue water from the lifeguard’s towering chair. In his ears, late-nineties punk rock reverberates; he’s taken Ronan’s shitty old earbuds and one of Gansey’s phones. Memories flash by while he sits there; Whelk in a Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned, exposing his pale throat and torso, and navy swimming trunks; sneaking his girlfriend out in the middle of the night for a picnic by the pool, to watch the stars--she’s got a bikini on and a sundress, and that’s it, even though it’s barely spring. More Whelk, but also the swim team. Noah had been the fastest, lithe as he was. His long arms had given him quite a good reach, even if he wasn’t the tallest of the tall. 

There’s a splash. Noah looks toward the deep end, and sees Matthew Lynch, floating in his boxers. 

He glances at the phone in his hand, warm against the death-cold of his skin, and then back at Matthew. Would Ronan even answer this number? Would he recognize it? Noah had found this phone in the very, very back of Gansey’s desk, hidden by papers and notebooks and chewed on, dry pens. He’d squeaked when the phone still had service, so loudly it had briefly interrupted Malory’s snoring and had gotten the Dog to raise its old, droopy eyelids to give him an old, droopy glare. Noah had felt, just by touching it, that Gansey hadn’t used it in years. That was why he’d allowed himself to take it.

Still. It  _ had _ been Gansey’s phone… Noah opens up the contact app. While he’s scrolling through the many, many contacts-how Gansey manages to know so many people and not completely lose his mind astounds him on a daily basis, but especially now-he realizes something:

Matthew Lynch is staring at him.

Not maliciously, of course. As far as Noah knows, the youngest Lynch has no malicious bone in his body. And why would he? He’s the perfect little brother, Ronan’s ideal. Three year old Ronan wouldn’t want a carbon copy of himself as a younger brother. Still, the intensity with which Matthew gazes at him is, as most things Noah’s encountered since his death, unnerving. It’s how Declan looks at Gansey, how Gansey looks at the world, how the world looks at Blue. Like Noah is a curiosity, and oddity, something to be explored and analyzed and investigated, something weird, something that shouldn’t be, but is. It isn’t the kind of expression he likes to see aimed at him, but that’s not what’s unnerving. What’s making Noah fidget is that it’s  _ Matthew Lynch _ who is looking at him this way.

They look at each other like this for what feels like hours. It feels like he can’t turn away, even if he wanted to, like Matthew is the sun and Noah is just a little planet with the misfortune of being tidally locked. It isn’t until the sky turns more navy than black that Matthew looks away from him; he pulls himself up and out of the pool, then sits on the side, kicking his feet in the water. He watches for a while, watches the ripples his feet create, like Apollo watching his sister push and pull the ocean from on high, a small, silly smile that feels  _ much _ more Matthew. 

Finally, the youngest Lynch leaves, leaving wet footprints that will be dry and gone by the time someone comes to actually open the pool. The surface of the water still ripples, half an hour after Matthew and his bouncy curls are at rest in his dorm room. Matthew is made of magic, born from it, woven out of its fibers. Fifteen years ago, Ronan had taken him by the hand and pulled him out of his own head in the form of a newborn; Noah has always imagined that to be when Ronan’s mindscape got a tiny bit darker, the little sun that had kept the plants alive and the animals warm having disappeared from it forever. For Noah, and for everyone else who knows just what Matthew is and where he came from, that’s all he ever saw him as. An imaginary friend brought to life in all its one-dimensional  glory.

Noah thinks that might have been true in the beginning. Up until recently, it might have been true. But in his death, he’s come to know that the things that make him up now are only half the world people like his mother and sister and Declan Lynch, the most mundane of the Lynches, live in. The other half is something more, something like Cabeswater and magic and beyond all that. And that part of him is speaking again, the way it did when he saw Blue the first time.  _ Something has changed, _ it whispers,  _ something inside that boy is different. Something in him that wasn’t there before is yearning. _

While Noah listens to that voice and its whisperings, something in his gut twitches; thirty miles away, in the suburbs, his sister has opened her eyes.

 

\---

 

Adele doesn’t check the caller ID when she answers the phone. No one she’s close with would ever call her at-she looks at her alarm clock-six o’clock in the morning, three hours before she has to wake up for her classes. None of her friends have the gravelly, roaring sort of voice the woman who speaks once Adele has her ear to the phone does, anyway, which leaves her with only one option. The women of 300 Fox Way have called her. 

“About time,” Calla says. “You should’ve answered on the first ring, girl. I just lost a twenty to Orla, damn it.” Despite the petrifying nature of this woman’s tone, she doesn’t actually sound angry, or even annoyed. If anything, Adele thinks, she sounds worried. “Where are you?”

“In bed. Why?”

Calla’s voice is muffled when she next speaks. “She says she’s in bed. Why is she-why the hell do  _ you _ think she’s in bed? She's a god damned college student, that's why. No. No. I said  _ no _ , Persephone! She won't be able to hear you even if you scream into the phone!” 

There’s a scuffle, and a bang, and by the time someone is speaking to her again Adele is downstairs making coffee. When someone does, it isn't the tiny voice she expects. “You still there?” Asks a bubbly, seductive voice. Adele smiles.

“Orla.”

“The one and only.”

Adele dumps two big lumps of sugar in with a tablespoon. “So what is it you wanted?” 

“What is it we--what do you  _ think _ we wanted?” Orla asks, accusatory. “Is it too early in the morning for your brain to function?”

Adele snorts. “Yes. So, please, explain.”

“We came up with a plan, obviously.”

“A plan.” Adele turns it over in her head, over and over, these two words. They sound dangerous with the hope they instill her with. It's a long time until Adele speaks, and over the din in her mind where ideas bounce off the interior of her skull, she can hear Orla’s nails tap tap tapping in impatience. She can feel her shifting her weight back and forth, and she can hear Calla’s violent pacing. And here, in her home, Adele can hear her mother awakening upstairs. “Tell me,” she says, little more than a whisper.

And Orla tells her, in that long-winded, sugar sweet, honey dripping way of hers. Then Calla takes her hand at it, and she explains it the way a lion rips into a gazelle after days without a successful hunt; ravenously, mercilessly. And finally, Persephone gets her turn to spin this plan of theirs into words understandable to someone like Adele, someone without whatever the three of them have that lets them be what they are. She does it slowly, explaining anything Adele needs explained, and she does it in that soft, tiny voice of hers. All the while, Adele sits at her bedroom desk, until her coffee is gone and her stomach has warmed with it, until her heart is aching, trapped in despair and hope and everything they bring. They strangle her like English ivy strangles a tree. 

When Persephone is done-and it takes a while-Adele is fully dressed and sliding into a pair of heels. “Have you eaten?”

“We could eat,” she says, her voice rough from all the use it's gotten. 

“Great. I’ll treat you. We should discuss this further.”

“We should,” Persephone agrees daintily. Adele can see her in that lumpy armchair, thin, pale legs crossed, free hand resting in her lap. There’s a pause, but it doesn't feel like she’s waiting for Adele to speak again; no, it’s like she’s seeing something. “Oh, that’s fancy. We’ll have to dress up.” 

“I’ll see you there, then.” Adele ends the call abruptly, waves at her mother as she passes her on the stairs, and heads out to her car. Her blood thrums in time with the engine as she pulls out of the driveway, an old CD blaring from her speakers.

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to BookDragon14, who I apparently made cry with my mediocre writing. You're great, and I adore you. Thank you for your sweetness.


End file.
